


A Pact

by LadyChi



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-12
Updated: 2011-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 18:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyChi/pseuds/LadyChi





	A Pact

_I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman.  
I have detested you long enough.  
I come to you as a grown child  
Who has had a pig-headed father;  
I am old enough now to make friends.  
It was you that broke the new wood,  
Now is a time for carving.  
We have one sap and one root -  
Let there be commerce between us._  
A Pact. Ezra Pound

  


  
**A Pact**   


Lying in bed, his fingers itch.

That good itch. That deep in the skin, to the bone itch. That itch that makes his feet restless and his heart rushed and his breath hard to come by.

Risk it all. Throw it all away. If it's good, you don't deserve it anyway.

Sick to the pit of his stomach, somehow elated and yet... _pissed_.

Because fuck if he didn't make himself a better man. If he didn't crawl out of the shadow of a father who nearly drove him to suicide, if he didn't get over the way his mother left, in the middle of the night, without so much as a goodbye.

Fuck if he didn't make himself into a good brother. If he didn't watch over Jared with the intensity of a hawk. If he didn't step in to take the blows when his father had too much to drink, if he didn't lay his body over his brother to take the kicks and the shouting and the pain.

Fuck the country that told him it was his duty to sacrifice his soul on the altar of patriotism. The country that sent him overseas, after he thought he was done, to teach young boys to kill and to die.

Fuck it _all_.

And fuck women, too. The ones who love him, and leave. And the ones who refuse to leave, but refuse to love.

Why can't anyone see what he needs?

He's been waiting for that magic moment – that moment when someone will see. Someone will tell him it's okay, and in the quiet of the night, lay their body over his and say “I'm never going to leave.”

And _mean_ it.

He's waiting for someone to make the pain worth it. Someone who makes bruised ribs and broken bones worth it. Someone who sees his sacrifice and acknowledges it.

He's lying in bed when he promises himself.

No more doe-eyed women with wanderlust in their souls. No more blind loyalty. No more romanticism.

This is the pact: It's time for Seeley Joseph Booth to really be a man. To stand on his own and not need anyone else.

It's time to keep Bones in the lab, where she belongs, goddamn it, and out of his head, where she screws everything up.

It's time to keep out the Hannahs and the Rebeccas and the Tessas.

This is the pact.

It's time to be a man.


End file.
